The Country Girl flops or soars

Tuesday 12 October 2010 09:03 BST

Suffering wife: Jenny Seagrove as Georgie

We all enjoy the occasional glimpse at theatrical life backstage but this disappointing revival of Clifford Odets’s 1950 drama, turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Grace Kelly, makes us wish we’d stayed firmly the other side of the footlights. Odets sets it up as a finely-calibrated three-way battle of wills between a director, an actor and his wife but Rufus Norris’s lacklustre production is bereft of the necessary emotional pointing. Everyone keeps telling us that everything is at stake, all the time, but I found it very hard to believe them.

Against advice, hotshot young director Bernie Dodd (Mark Letheren) is determined to cast washed-up former star Frank Elgin (Martin Shaw) as the lead in a new, Broadway-bound play. An alcoholic and compulsive liar, Elgin is utterly dependent on his wife, Georgie (Jenny Seagrove).

Shaw has a decent stab at drunk and dishevelled, swigging with abandon at the cough mixture with the high alcohol content, but the real problem lies where the play’s beating, bleeding heart should be. Even when expressing any sign of positivity – and there are few enough of these available to Georgie — Seagrove looks pinched and blanched of emotion, which results in a grim one-note performance. It’s increasingly difficult to care whether Georgie stays or goes, Frank learns his lines or sets off on a bender, the play flops or soars.